Furniture Design Ideas

Altering the species composition of a plant community to make it more visually appealing is one way to make native plants more exciting to a public whose appreciation of ecology often goes no further than getting a nice warm buzz from hearing the word. It is an approach that is most advanced in the US, […]

Tree-planting schemes are the most widely carried out form of habitat restoration. Native species are generally preferred, with the use of stock raised from local-provenance a relatively recent concern (Flora Locale 2001). As noted above, however, there is often remarkably little insight into either the aesthetic or the ecological aspects of woodland planting in the […]

Many of the US practitioners in the field are eloquent in their articulation of the need to sell ecological planting to the public by making it as attractive as possible, ‘we must seduce people into loving the landscape’ as Carol Franklin, a senior associate of Andropogon Associates puts it (Franklin 2001a). In particular, ‘homeowners’ must […]

Given that the natural environment of urban areas is often so altered and degraded, there is arguably little rationale behind being too fixed in our notions of what vegetation community is appropriate for particular locations. Particular communities are recognised as having an aesthetic that is more appreciated than others, which may lead to situations where […]

The creation of natural habitats, using native species, in urban areas is itself a statement about art, design and philosophy, and is characteristic only of those cultures that have become most intensely urbanised and which display a desire to renegotiate their relationship to nature. The areas which are restored can vary considerably in size, from […]

These clusters of philosophy and practice can be represented on a gradient to describe the relationship between art and nature in garden and landscape design. The ‘nature’ end might be indistinguishable by the casual observer from the creation of ‘semi-natural habitats’, developing dynamically with a minimum of human intervention. The other extreme is represented by […]

Noel Kingsbury Introduction This chapter provides an overview of contemporary approaches to the use of plants in designed landscapes that are described as being ‘ecological’, ‘natural’ or ‘naturalistic’, or are said to operate or be inspired by the principles that lie behind these words. Needless to say, definitions of ‘ecological’ vary widely: commercial pressures, fashion […]

It is clear from the examples given in this chapter that the practice of phytogeographic or plant geographical, physiognomic and ecological planting gradually merged and partially overlapped as ecological science and political and social movements developed. This type of planting arises out of the Enlightenment, which had encouraged a different perception of the concept of […]

In the eighteenth century, Carl von Linne (Linnaeus) had given natural history research a fresh impetus and had provided a new perspective on nature, with Uppsala University as the centre. Botanical research remained important and one of his later successors as professor in botany, Rutger Sernander (1866-1944), wrote his thesis about the development of vegetation […]

Pre-Second World War British landscape design was dominated by the writings of Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson, with a horticultural and artistic emphasis, rather than an ecological one. Yet much of their inspiration for plants and planting arrangement came from wildflowers of the British countryside. The Reverend C. A.Johns’ Flowers of the Field (1851) had […]